Athletics: A true sporting revolutionary

Fosbury is celebrated for the 'Fosbury Flop' which revolutionised high jumping. Photo / AP

Sporting legends come in all shapes and sizes, but US athlete Dick Fosbury reckons they all share one common attribute.

With one giant leap backwards Fosbury revolutionised the sport of high jumping and won the gold medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Visiting New Zealand in his capacity as president of the World Olympians Association, the 63-year-old American was a special guest at this week's dinner honouring our "Golden Girls" - New Zealand's six female Olympic gold medallists.

After hearing the remarkable stories of the elite group that includes Yvette Corlett (nee Williams), Barbara Kendall, Sarah Ulmer, Caroline Meyer and Georgina Earl (the Evers-Swindell twins) and Valerie Adams, Fosbury recognised the same fighting qualities he demonstrated in his career in each of the six women.

"These women are heroes in this country and they are heroes around the world as well," said Fosbury.

"I think one of the qualities these women have and all champions have is that they are fairly stubborn, they never give up when there are setbacks."

It is an attribute Fosbury showed throughout his career. With a stubborn insistence to do things his way, he transformed the sport of high jumping, pioneering a back-first technique, which is now named after him.

It's a story he's told for the past 40-odd years since winning gold at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, using the technique which was strange at the time and the source of ridicule. But far from tiring of explaining how and why he developed the technique, Fosbury's eyes light up as he recalls how he turned the sport on its head.

As a lanky child Fosbury was drawn to the high jump event in junior high school, where his height and long legs proved a huge advantage. In his junior years Fosbury used the scissor jump, whereby the athlete runs at the bar on a diagonal and more or less hurdles it, scissoring their legs over the bar and landing on their feet.

The technique had been considered outdated since 1895, when straddling jumps were introduced. Still, Fosbury had won one or two meets a year.

In high school his coach insisted on the western roll, in which a jumper also runs in from an angle but kicks his outer (rather than inner) leg over the bar and crosses the bar sideways, usually landing on his feet. Fosbury couldn't get the hang of it.

Struggling to clear even 1.6 metres using the western roll, Fosbury despaired - he was not progressing in the event and getting badly beaten at high school track meets. On the verge of giving up, at the next meet he decided to revert back to the scissor technique. He cleared 1.64 metres in his first jump. But that wouldn't be enough. The other jumpers were still warming up, waiting for the bar to be raised to a more age-appropriate height.

Fosbury knew if he was to advance, he would have to try something different and thus the "Fosbury flop" was created more out of desperation than design. "I knew I had to do something different, so by feel I began to lift my hips and my shoulders went back and it worked."

"So each successive attempt I evolved from sitting up to laying flat on my back and I ended up clearing 5'10" - I had improved by half a foot in one day."

In an event that measured advancement by fractions of an inch, sometimes over a year, Fosbury knew having made such a massive improvement in the space of a day, he was on to a winner. So he kept at it, refining his technique over the next two years, making the adjustments completely by feel.

"It really began to evolve. The next year I began to lead with my shoulder so I was going in angled to the bar, the year after that I was completely turning my back to the bar and arching over, so it was an evolution that took a couple of years."

His methods weren't initially popular though - they represented an absolute departure in form and technique and some considered it an insult to suggest, after all these years, that there had been a better way to get over a bar all along. And if there were, it ought to have come from a coach, a sports science expert, or a biomechanic, not a gawky teenager of mediocre jumping ability.

But Fosbury believes teenagers by their very nature are more innovative and open to experimentation. "It's one of the interesting aspects I think happens in sport. Kids are creative in how they play games and you've got to keep them together so they stay within rules, but other than that they're free to be inventive and figure out what their bodies can do."

Of course, few could argue Fosbury's methods weren't effective when he went on to claim Olympic gold in Mexico.

Four years later in Munich, 28 of the 40 competitors used Fosbury's technique and today it is the most popular style of high jumping.

"I'm very proud to have made a contribution to a sport that I love and I'm astounded 40 years later that it's named after me and it's a gift, it's given me this opportunity to travel the world and continue to give back."